Mr Tranquillo, my partner in life, my travel agent, gentleman and scholar, has taken up blogging. Now I have to guard my photos like a hawk. I used to dip into his pictures willy nillly, with a ‘what’s yours is mine’ approach, like a free digital bank. Now I must ask politely. In his last blog, he stole some of my photos from Chile to complete a story about graffiti. In doing so, he unearthed an old file of mine and took me back to Valparaiso.
He had worked on this post for some time and had wandered the streets of Brunswick to get some urban grunge into the mix. We now both loiter with intent and camera. He has always been my patient editor, questioning some of my more rash approaches: now I am his, encouraging him to loosen up.
Although the subjects of our posts sometimes cross paths, our writing styles are distinct. Both our professional lives were based on writing, but for distinctly different purposes. We both devour books, but rarely do we read the same things. During our last trip to Thailand, my holiday reading took me to the obsessive world of Elena Ferrante, and after four volumes of her Neapolitan series, I am pleased to have escaped. While stuck in Ferrante’s world, Mr T found a hard backed tome, left behind on the book shelf in our guest house in Nong Khai, Thailand. Entitled, ‘The Malaria Project’ by Karen M Masterson, it exposed
America’s secret mission to combat malaria during World War II—a campaign modeled after a German project which tested experimental drugs on men gone mad from syphilis.
Nice holiday reading indeed! He tends to choose more non fiction than I do. And although we spend most of our time together and can read each other’s thoughts, we are quite different, we really are.
Take a look at Mr Tanquillo’s blog- he writes beautifully.
https://nomadicpaths.wordpress.com
ALMOST ITALIAN 